Lack of adequate resources is often a major roadblock when deploying technology-based solutions to developing countries to provide timely access to accurate information, such as for the outbreak of disease. Issues of insufficient capital, unstable electricity and lack of Internet connectivity, Information Technology (IT) equipment and tech-savvy workers often surface. Fortunately, wireless and mobile technologies have eased the burden of cost, infrastructure and labor required for connecting remote communities to more developed areas. However, connectivity is merely a prerequisite for getting timely access to complete and accurate information.
Even in rich organizations working in developed areas, a great deal of additional physical and digital infrastructure is needed for acquiring and managing data, such as health-related data. However, these tools often do not take into account the operating conditions of resource-limited facilities and often do not fit within their workflows and social context. Yet, many technology-related efforts in the developing world continue to impose pre-formed ideas that do not adapt to the needs, advantages and capabilities of the local population they serve.
For example, in Tanzania, due to a lack of local capacity, one group had to rely on trained health workers to digitally report, using the short messaging service (SMS) capabilities of their mobile phones, malaria-related information they were recording in their patient logbook. These individuals constituted the same staff primarily responsible for providing medical services to a long line of potentially sick people standing outside their clinic's door. To satisfy reporting requirements, many health workers had to stop offering medical services in order to digitize the malaria-related data from their logbook. Oftentimes, health workers had very little formal education and found the task of encoding information with their mobile phones difficult to comprehend. Consequently, in some cases, malaria microscopists and community health workers were spending more time encoding and texting logbook information than seeing the patients they were trained to serve in the first place.